First non aircrew female being station commander for a flying station

It’s good to show the times are moving

New station commander for Lossie been appointed and she comes from an ops/ infra background than aircrew

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Not necessarily true.

Group Captain (soon to be Air Commodore) Claire O’Grady was the Station Commander at Brize is an Adminer and the new Staish at Brize, Group Captain Louise Henton whos background is personnel support (I think).

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Front line fighter station then :wink:

Grp Capt Rowena Atherton was boss at RAF Wittering 2006-08 when the Harrier was operational from there :man_shrugging:t2:

Or just Lossiemouth. Halton had a female staish when I went through.

So not taking anything away from the person concerned but is this bad wording by the newspaper & it’s the first time Lossiemouth has had a female station commander.

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Certainly seems that way.

It’s a great achievement anyhow.

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The RAF have changed the role of a staish completely. They’ve split out the DDH role for flying and given that to another OF5 who is typically in charge of the [“X stn] Wing”
The STN Cdr now keeps the head of establishment roles as well as the Commanding Officer title.
Speaks to the amount of bureaucracy there is nowadays that 2 X OF5 are needed to do the same work, probably due to the shrinking number of bases that are now consolidated
A cynic may even suggest that doubling the number of command appointments is a bit of a jobs for the boys scheme for underemployed GRP capts…
PS well done to GP Capt Sarah, I worked with her many years ago and she is very good

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But was she none aircrew ?

Typical reporting by the Northern Scot, you get used to it.

Yes, first time Lossie has had a female station commander rather than the first female station commander ever.

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If times really were ‘moving on,’ this appointment of a female RAF officer to a senior command position wouldn’t be newsworthy. Roll on that day. :thinking:

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Only 10% of the RAF is Female and 82% of the UK population is White. Having a RAF officer who is not a white male is going to be unusual.

Just had a look at the ethnic minority rates in the RAF and the wider forces. I was shocked at the result. 99.8% at OF-6 and above are white.

OBE in the latest honours list I think now

i wonder though, when those OF-6 joined up say in the 90s - what was the % of non white recruits? and how many of those were still in 10 years later?

while i do not disagree the number is a poor reflection of what it could be, people do not walk into Senior positions, be that in the Armed Forces or in civil street (eg business).
they all work their way up which takes 20-30 years and so always have the disconnect between those “at the top” not being representative of today’s society.

the first female jet pilot for the RAF was in 1992, yet it was 2011 that the first female Red Arrow pilot was appointed - some nearly 20 years later.

Two of the women who made an impact on the RAF were Air Cdr’s Joan Hopkins and Jayne Millington, both became heads of UK air defence, the latter co-ordinated UK air defence for the 2012 Olympics.

For this to be true, there would need to be 500 OF-6s and above and only one of them ‘non-white’. If two weren’t white, there would need to be 1,000 in total, etc.

Do we really have that many people ranked OF-6 and above? If so, we have bigger issues than the colour of their skin.

That number is for HM forces in total.

It still sounds extraordinarily high for forces the size of ours.

So out of courisity i took a took

via Google it lead me to List of serving senior officers of the British Army - Wikipedia

and i can count almost 200 on that list who have been promoted in the last 4 years (the first four Brig in that list were promoted in 2016-17 so not sure how “serving” they still are 8 years on)

now while we all know the Army is the largest Force, and so unlikely the Navy and RAF would follow suit and have a similar ~200 each - if they did that would make 600. so allowing for a proportionate decrease for their size each having ~150 would make the numbers reach ~500
And this is without considering the MOD civil service numbers